You too now begin to be a magician!

Amazon Coins… not such a great idea…

So here’s the deal… Amazon gets you to trade your ‘real money’ for things that aren’t real… Oh wait, isn’t that what they do with Kindle books already? Don’t get me wrong, I buy TONS of Kindle books – but I protect my investment. So what is the difference, what is the rub; this little marketing ploy works something like this:

Buy 500 coins, for $9.95. Then we will sell you digital objects for these fake coins instead of ‘real’ money – today you can get 10 items for 100 coins – so really, you are getting a great deal! But what you don’t really understand is that the real value of the products you are buying can now be arbitrarily set and after a while you won’t even realize that when they get you down to 1 item for 250 coins you are paying almost $5 for something you used to be able to get for 10 cents.

Funny thing is, this is exactly what our U.S. government did to us when they took away the gold standard; so today, we don’t really even have a concept of the value of a product that we pay for with U.S. Currency (because it really isn’t of any value anyway).

It’s the oldest trick in the book; I’ll go for a lot of things Amazon, but you won’t catch me on this one!